This thing is great to check up on the house. We can see if our pet has made a mess, and give kids instructions from work (or see if they've made a mess!). We opted to subscribe to the cloud service as we got multiple cameras for our home; it works out quite cheap compared to a lot of the traditional security systems we researched. Also, it allows you to ignore parts of the field of view to stop triggering recording unnecessarily which is extremely helpful I found.